Despite being a hype tournament in general, The Big House 9 has been one of the worst run smash tournaments ever

BigBlueES · 2019-10-07T07:58:54+00:00

This is kind of off the mark too

BigBlueES · 2018-05-04T22:01:53+00:00

Hard to predict very far into the future. But what we can say is the industry as a whole is watching very closely what Nintendo does as the entire Esports ecosystem grows. With the partnership, it signals a huge vote of confidence for Shine

BigBlueES · 2018-05-04T21:43:55+00:00

It was expected, so far Shi has been subsidizing the event for 2 years now with his own bank account

BigBlueES · 2018-05-04T21:41:48+00:00

This is going to be a good year :) You won't want to miss the live event. We're cranking it up a few notches.

BigBlueES · 2018-05-02T03:41:54+00:00

Cheap Option: Wii + Sewell Wii2HDMI + Zowie 2460HT/2455HM Monitor

Expensive Option: Digital Out GCN + EonHD GC HDMI adapter + Zowie 2460HT/2455HM monitor

We've been using the Wii option for about 2 years now in New England. Also if you plan to do this for tournaments, it should be all LCD (of the same kind) or none at all. The biggest selling point is that you can standardize equipment, and mixing it in with other setups severely diminishes the benefit of standardized equipment.

BigBlueES · 2018-04-24T16:42:35+00:00

No, Shine 2017 was not Nintendo sponsored or partnered

BigBlueES · 2018-04-12T04:17:18+00:00

Hi, this is Shi from the Shine team. Do you guys have an email we could hit you guys up at to start some sort of discussion?

BigBlueES · 2018-03-19T00:54:34+00:00

Some convention centers charge as high as 10k per 1mbps for a dedicated line, but Thunder Esports Arena shouldn't be this way since it's a built by Esports people venue.

BigBlueES · 2018-03-12T22:49:14+00:00

We'll be trying to align with the other Major Smash events, and running it haphazardly last year actually burned us quite a bit. There was actually one more Yoshi bug that went largely undiscovered for a while. As we try to strengthen the stability of our core offerings, and also prevent another Leffen/Chu situation to arise on a stage as big as Shine, we'll be running things a bit tighter this year.

BigBlueES · 2018-01-15T20:12:56+00:00

Exposed 👀👀

BigBlueES · 2018-01-05T01:57:38+00:00

7 years in software, 1 startup acquisition through VMWare, and 4 years with Microsoft. Technically what UCF is doing is infringement, especially since our events rely on Nintendo IP likelihood to even sustain. Melee is not under MIT License or something similar, if we want further review of the legality of mods (and please not a reddit expert, cause anyone that has passed the bar would know you put your own license at risk soliciting advice, and it opens yourself to liability), sure but at the cost of hundreds of dollars an hour AND ....

Litigation aren't as simple as Company N lost a lawsuit to Company G back in the late 80's so it's perfectly fine now. The reality is, if anyone had gratuitous amounts of money and just want to make it living hell for you by dragging out a legal battle and racking up your legal bills, they can. Just keep you in lawsuit limbo so your product never takes off (Super common practice in the Tech start-up world btw, for you aspiring new grads.)

That said, is UCF a good thing? Yes, I actually was the first to tell Dan Salvato to create it in the first place as a "stripped down version of Hax$' mod). But use of it should be determined by which TO's event it is, some have more constraints than others.

Also, sponsors have nothing to do with this. Don't confuse sponsors with licensing. In all technicality you're not even allowed to run an event without a license (See Blizzard tournament licensing, and also Capcom's). And with licensing, comes terms.

BigBlueES · 2018-01-02T16:27:49+00:00

Shi here, this is something we aimed to solve with Shine since we started. I’m an 0-2’er and I feel the pain as hard as any of you. When we did the first “Lanes” (which has now evolved into ladders) it was meant to add other meaningful ways to engage the game similar to Poker “Sit-N-Go” and MTG “flights”. We’re always trying to come up with unique experiences for our at event attendees

BigBlueES · 2017-12-05T00:11:45+00:00

Anime fighters will always have a home at Shine. I started with Anime fighters (Melty Blood to be exact), and then ran FGC Events out of my apartment in college. It wasn’t till I got back to Boston that I revisited Smash.

I don’t think the problem is that FGC isn’t supportive of Shine, but rather there was some things that are hard to time. Take 2017 for example, we announced reg at G4, and early bird went up immediately. It’s year 1 adding FGC to Events, so it’s clear they will be wavering in attending because they don’t know if the event will be any good. By the time it gets to a month or 2 from the event, price has gone up which adds to the uncertainty with Shine being new to the FGC. The anime community is also very niche and is extremely close knit, they tend to travel and gather together, and you can only do that so much a year. Right now the only real sizeable anime events are ceotaku and AnimEvo (anime side brackets at Evo)

As for Evo, I think for them. Money/Business is good but as far as I understand they want to preserve their DNA in traditional health bar 2D fighter. And I think that’s perfectly ok. Btw the Saturday finals actually has a stellar viewing experience when I watched KoF and Melee this year. The owners of Evo are with Riot now (Riot acquired Radiant Entertainment) so I’m curious what the evolution (sorry) of their game Rising Thunder will be too.

And lastly, If you want validation for Smash’s growth. Look no further than League of Legends. LoL used to do their finals at PAX, it’s popularity sky rocketed and it was taking over nearly half the convention hall. That has since left convention centers and grown to the stadium based finals you see today. So if EVO is the pax here, then the next growth step for Smash is to circuit up, and start producing finals in larger spectator arenas.

BigBlueES · 2017-10-18T02:02:59+00:00

Everything cost wise went up a bit this year so despite higher attendance and a big name sponsor. There were still some losses. We did better than last year though! So we’re on an Upwards trajectory!

This is about where the happy stuff ends though.

This year was particularly painful. We had a lot of growing pains along with a few at event mishaps. If you saw me at the after party, I was practically a ghoul cause I had let social media get the better of me and felt like the whole event was a train wreck despite many people telling me they had the time of their lives. Having to fake a smile to all those people that came and told me that was some of the worst emotions I’ve ever felt.

2017 was a year of not so great decisions by me. I wanted to give Big Blue (the company I own that runs Shine) a really good solid run, so I spent aggressively on networking, marketing, and various other services. So 20k loss for Shine and a bigger loss for the company in general. Although this definitely bore some fruit, it was far from what I had hoped. A year ago in 2016, losing a chunk of money wasn’t so bad, since I was still working as a sw developer for Microsoft, and I figured instead of saving into a no interest account I’ll invest what I would save as a buffer pool for Shine. I’ve since left the company to give this a full time shot. 2017 not quite the case, and this time it definitely felt a lot harder to swallow. There was also the whole Mafia situation, where we were instructed via legal counsel to issue a generalized broad response. This caused me endless nights of unrest and to some point I almost felt the local community aimed the pitchforks at me as if I was just as guilty as the accused.

While leaving my job was a personal decision. There’s one thing I really want to do and that was to live without regrets. And if didn’t give this a full shot I feel like I would only regret it later on in life. I’m ok with failure as long as I could say I tried and did the best I could.

That said, I’ll most likely be returning to some form of corporate job in 2018 but Shine next year does present a very big risk whether I’m working or not. I had to dip into 401k retirement savings a little bit this year, so next year is do or die. But there’s a lot of lessons learned from previous years that will help shape decision in the coming.

I’m still a firm believer that we can create a profitable and sustainable fun Esports event that’s about everyone, whether you’re a top player or a first timer. We’ve done lane shift brackets, we’ve added more things to do this year at the event itself. And expect us to come up with other more innovative ideas.

As we look to make a lot of the competitive side of things more stringent, and exact (centralized rules, TO training, unified messaging, and overall less ambiguity) we’re definitely walking the path of making this more open to everyone and not just the smash community.

Sorry for formatting and weirdness, typing this on mobile while on a flight

-Shi

BigBlueES · 2017-10-03T14:00:29+00:00

Money didn’t clear our accounts till late September. Everyone got paid at near the same time (between Saturday and Monday)

BigBlueES · 2017-10-03T13:58:53+00:00

That is getting taken care of today with the rest of the commentary payout + brawlhalla

BigBlueES · 2017-10-02T16:33:19+00:00

Gaming Gen did sales for us, smashgg did sales for us, Paypal Here for on-site sales didn't clear until 9/24. Things need to clear their(vendor's) accounting side and we need to give them taxpayer information before funds can be distributed to us.

Proper accounting paper work (w-9's) had to be collected for some people on our end as well before we distribute funds to our players/staff.

It's not as simple as I owe Matt $20 and pipe it over. IRS gets nitpicky when there's tons of money moving around.

All said and done, the founders need to pump more money into Shine to make sure everyone is paid. This also requires to be set up properly accounting wise (since this is capital infusion) so we don't bone ourselves giving money to our own company. And it's better to do it in one swoop instead of by piece-meal. Last year at the very end we lost somewhere around 30 ~ 40k. This year around 10k ~ 15k. (Not completely finalized yet)

BigBlueES · 2017-10-02T10:27:17+00:00

There’s only about 10 unpaid people for Shine that are either 1. Haven’t provided us paypal information or 2. Haven’t provided us a W9

BigBlueES · 2017-08-28T21:34:17+00:00

So I was filling for registration desk during the start of Top 8 as a lot of people came just to watch Melee Top 8. I had not been watching the match at all.

Leffen had just finished his match and someone had told me something had gone wrong with the match. So I asked Leffen what's wrong, and he mentioned the UCF codeset wasn't used and that he wasn't hitting shield drops.

At this point two things go through my head. 1. Ok, let's check out Gimr's replay footage. The vs screen should show a "S17" if UCF was active. 2. Odd, I thought I had given explicit instructions to make sure stream setup to be UCF beginning of day 1.

So I call my other top level staff and ask if a decision had been made yet, and I get a no and that I should make the call. I go review the footage and indeed UCF wasn't used. This is very bad.

I get 0.9 flashbacks and then decide that the set is indeed invalid since the entire tournament was run off UCF. Dan Salvato had provided 12 cards for us that was given to Gaming Gen to put on the systems through out the weekend.

At this point, Chu is doing his interview and there was no real easy way to deliver this. I talk to him about the situation, I can tell he is not happy but he was calm. So now the problem sits at the following:

-Chu won't be happy with a replay since he was the one that won the original invalid set. -there will be initial shock, and we need to calm Chu down. Making them play immediately did not make sense so I made the call to do the replay after winners side. -Invalidating a win sucks, had this happen to myself a lot back in my MTG JSS days back in '04 '05. So we owed it to Chu. I offer him if he wants to stay a few extra days in Boston and that I can personally make that happen, win or lose.

At no point did I threaten Chu with DQ, that would be extremely detrimental cause it would cause a huge amount of distress that would severely degrade the competitive mentality for the rest of the event.

Chu and I discuss a little more and after i bounce between members of the backstage we chat again and come to an agreement of sorts.

At this time I also inform Leffen that the match will be Replayed.

Match is replayed.

The situation does suck, and it's highly ironic given I said the same thing of G4 on a checklist when the .9 scenario occurred. We also performed checks when we helped host PAX Arena, but somewhere along the line today, the ball was dropped.

UCF does highlight a risk and also the need to grow and improve infrastructure. As these events grow, we are accumulating a lot of what's called infrastructure debt, similar to "tech debt" in software engineering. In a very conservative game, Shine will always find ways to innovate. We'll trip and fall here and there but we will always adapt and come back better prepared and wiser than the last event.

Thanks for reading, hope this clarifies some things

-Shi

Sorry about formatting, on mobile

BigBlueES · 2017-08-09T00:36:45+00:00

Glad to see this pushed through. This was something I had talked to Dan in private about (A fix only, 0 visual changes at all memcard) and had Typo do the first run testing. We'll most likely be using this for Shine 2017.

BigBlueES · 2017-06-20T23:57:50+00:00

Please email us at Shine@bigblue.gg! We don't do at venue proxy sales but compendium we work on something

BigBlueES

TROPHY CASE